Intrusion
by stormwreath
Summary: A bleak, dystopian tale of cybercrime, computer hacking, tentacle monsters, robot ninja, sultry yet dangerous Latina lesbians, a troubled hero with a dark past, gratuitous product placement, black helicopters, and possibly a happy ending.
1. Chapter 1

The warm wind sidled in from the desert and twined around the city by the sea, snaking through the cement canyons and staining its purity with dust and grime and the fumes from a million car exhausts. As the sun sank towards the greedy waiting ocean, streetlights flickered on and the freeways became gleaming rivers of silver and red.

High above the scurrying ants'-nest, insulated from the noise and heat and dirt by a triple-glazed picture window and the distant hum of air conditioning, a young woman gazed out towards the western horizon. The setting sun glinted redly off her Diesel sunglasses and sparked matching highlights from her hair. Stretching out her hand, she rested it flat against the cool, smooth surface of the glass as if saluting a dying adversary, before turning back towards the darkening room.

Behind her, the faint imprint of her palm and fingers remained, marring the crystalline perfection of the window.

Scattered over the desk set near the adjacent wall was an incongruously colourful jumble of cheap clocks, bought earlier that week from a wholesaler in Chinatown. Each one was moulded in the form of a famous landmark: Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty... and probably none of them had ever been within a thousand miles of the place they represented. Still and unexpectedly, they told perfect time to the tenth of a second, each set to the time zone of the country they claimed to be a gift from. The redhead was confident of that; she'd made sure of it personally. Now her attention was drawn to the tacky model of the Eiffel Tower telling her that in Central Europe, the workday was just beginning. She'd never been to Paris... at least, not in the flesh. That wasn't necessary.

Removing her sunglasses and laying them carefully down on the desk, she turned to her companion, who lay sprawled comfortably if inelegantly on her stomach on the king size bed, watching a movie on the large plasma-screen TV. It had Spanish subtitles, and the sound was turned off, making it pretty much incomprehensible to the redhead.

"It's time."

There was a late-model PowerBook on the desk next to the clocks, and the redhead bent to plug it in and power it up. On the bed, the dark-haired girl swung herself around to sit cross-legged and grabbed the remote control.

"D'you want me to turn this off? Will it distract you?"

"No. And thanks. Uh, for, y'know, asking. Are you sure you can even follow it like that? It's all in foreign and stuff."

"Sure. It's good practice. Keep in touch with my traditional culture, that kind of thing."

"Sweetie, you never even met your grandparents."

"Didn't mean them. All the help spoke Spanish, back when I was a kid, and it was fun talking to them. Learned all kinds of stuff. Plus it pissed off Dad, which was always a bonus."

Such casual acceptance of wealth and privilege - not boasting about it, any more than a fish boasts about being able to swim, but just living it, being it - still bothered the redhead sometimes. Not that it didn't come in useful at times. Take last Sunday, when they'd first checked into the hotel...

The reception clerk had turned unexpectedly difficult at the idea of two women requesting a double room for themselves. He'd started making bland excuses about over-booking and rooms being closed for renovation. She'd felt flustered and hurt, knowing what he was doing but not wanting to make waves. Avoid confrontation, swallow the anger and store it up for later: that's how she'd always worked before. Not so her companion.

The younger woman was almost physically incapable of backing down from a fight. She'd laid down the law in no uncertain fashion – insisting on her rights as a paying customer, demanding to know if her money wasn't good enough (and waving a wallet full of gold and platinum credit cards under the clerk's nose to emphasise her point), hinting briefly at the possibility of lawsuits before casually mentioning exactly how much business the various corporations her father owned did with that hotel chain. In a state of near-panic the clerk summoned his manager who hastily upgraded them to a penthouse suite at no extra cost, apologising profusely all the while.

Even though she knew they'd been completely in the right, she still felt some embarrassment at the scene they'd caused. And she noticed her companion was being extra-polite to the porter carrying their bags, which was usually a sign of inner turmoil. Still, neither of them was about to complain at getting the best room in the hotel.

That was a week ago; a week spent preparing, researching, acquiring supplies in a dozen different shops. Curiously, the names on those credit cards hadn't all been the same... although none of them were stolen. Not exactly, anyway. And now they were ready.

The redhead sat down at the computer and opened Firefox, clicking on one of her stored bookmarks. When she first started this game - Goddess, was it more than ten years ago now? - there'd have been the squealing and clicking of the modem as it made its slow connection. She missed that noise sometimes. Not the slowness, of course - but the sound had always thrilled her. It meant she was leaving the confusing, frustrating real world and entering a realm where she had the power. Where she could slide around the confining rules and order everything to her liking. Sometimes she thought about getting a recording of the noise and setting it to play whenever she opened her web browser, but then decided that would be too geeky even for her.

Not all the software she was running on this laptop was off-the-shelf. Not all of it was legal. In fact, not all of it obeyed the rules of logic that ought to apply in this dimension, and some of the people who'd helped write it hadn't exactly been human. And some of the websites she was passing through as she constructed her false backtrail – following links that weren't supposed to be accessible to the public – didn't exactly appear in the standard listings. Still, they were just tools. She was the artist, weaving her scarlet thread through the electronic tapestry.

And at the end, it brought her to a dull corporate-looking website in German, all muted colours and serious serif fonts and a discrete log-in box in the top right corner. She sighed, and leaned back in her chair, stretching out the cricks, startled to see how late it was, how dark the room had become. Moments later, a soft arm crept around her waist and she felt her lover's chin resting gently on her shoulder. She leaned gratefully into the warmth.

"How's it going? You in yet?"

"Mmm. Getting there. I think. Or maybe I'm just about to download the last five years' annual reports from a German insurance company. Or, y'know, make my computer blow up."

"I'd go for the explosion. More fun."

"And probably less dangerous to our health. But seriously, sweetie, things could get all ooky pretty quickly now. They've probably got defences on their defences. And I'm gonna have to go all Matrix-y to get past them, and things could go wrong, or they might have something I don't know about, and there might be traps set for me, and I - "

"Hey! You can do it, Red. You're the best there is, and they can _not_ keep you out." A giggle. "Any more than I can. So c'mon. Anything I can get for you before you start back in?"

"Lots and lots of alcohol?"

"Drinking and hacking: bad idea. _Afterwards_ we can party. But now," - she smiled at a shared memory - "I'll make you some tea."

The steaming hot cup appeared at her elbow a few minutes later, but the redhead was already rapt in her electronic world once more. She sipped absently as the cracking program tried to break through the site's security, tweaking the parameters every time it came up blank. Since she'd already used that same program to break into the FBI's main database two days ago - just as a test, no ulterior motives - it was clear that this site enjoyed a level of security nothing merely human could have produced.

"So probably not an insurance company, then."

She sighed. She'd known this moment was coming even as she'd hoped it would never arrive - but here it was. No choice now.

She looked over at the younger woman who was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her at work with an anxiety that her native insouciance tried and failed to cover up.

"This is it, sweetie. Can you help me? And please - be careful. I don't know what I might do if things... go wrong."

"They won't". Brown eyes looked deep into hazel as her lover sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk and rested her hands either side of the laptop. The redhead covered her hands with her own, gave them a gentle squeeze then breathed in deeply.

"OK. Not nervous. Here we go."


	2. Chapter 2

The redhead began reciting something that sounded vaguely poetic, but otherwise just like gibberish to the brunette. One word - perhaps a name? - seemed to recur frequently. A faint tingling like static electricity started in her hands, crept up her arms, making the hairs stand on end. She felt a pulling sensation, a tugging that threatened to turn her inside out; but she'd felt it before, and knew not to fight against it. To surrender, let herself fall, feel the exhilarating rush of the energy flowing through, past and out of her instead of fighting painfully to keep it in, trusting only that her lover would take just enough, and not too much...

And then it was over, sharp and abrupt, as the redhead lifted up her hands and put them onto the keyboard... no, _into_ the keyboard, as her fingers sank in as if the plastic had become water. A sheen passed over her eyes; the colour leaching away, pupil and iris and white blending together, becoming glittery like glass, shiny like the surface of a mirror. Flickers passed across the blank surface of her eyes, too fast to track; numbers and words and pictures, breaking down into the 1s and 0s of binary code, sleeting across the reflective surface.

_High walls of green glass stretched up around her, curving like the inside of a womb, meeting high overhead. Motes of electricity danced in the refracted light shining in from all around; whispers and ruffles and a noise like distant waves sighed in her ears. Willow looked at herself reflected in the viridescent surface – cartoon-red hair, silver eyes, simplified features: an avatar. Thousands of avatars, stretching into infinity as the round glass walls caught her reflection, split and multiplied it. Above her, a glowing portal spilled a river of light into the gleaming chamber, pouring over the edge and disappearing into the floor. She concentrated on it, and within an instant she was standing in the portal, the stream washing around her without touching her. Another moment and she was outside. Endless blackness enveloped her, lit by distant stars and wheeling constellations. When she concentrated, she could see the myriad silver and golden rivers connecting them all, tying them together into a vast interconnected web of light._

_Her eye fell on the nearest flowing stream, and without further thought she was in it, floating down the current. Behind her, the green glowing dome she'd left shrank instantly to a tiny, achingly beautiful model floating in the blackness. A small green apple, with the Greek word καλλίστη engraved in rather clumsy golden letters on the side. She smiled fondly at the multiple meanings. _

_The apple was hers, of course. None of the imagery around her was strictly necessary: it just made it easier to interact with this new world if it was represented in familiar ways. Plus, it was pretty. An apple had seemed the most obvious symbolic representation for her PowerBook, back when she'd first laid out the parameters. But she'd brought her girlfriend with her into this world a few times, to share the adventure with her, and it'd been Kennedy who'd added the writing to the apple. "For the most beautiful". Because that's who she was in Kennedy's eyes, and the warmth and wonder that thought still awoke in her every time she read it never failed to inspire her. And on the other hand, the Apple of Discord was a harbinger of war, death, suffering and apocalypse; and sometimes it didn't hurt to remind herself of what she was capable of. What she once almost did._

_What she might be on the receiving end of, if things went wrong now. Another moment's thought and she was hurtling along the shining pathways, following the route she'd set up manually earlier. Galaxies wheeled and plunged around her, she burst through a hundred new worlds and out the other side, speeding as fast as a photon, and then coming to a halt in front of a vast, perfect sphere, all dark and unreflective like cold iron, absorbing the heat and light from its surroundings._

_She lay her hands on the outside, and a portal opened in the featureless sphere. She stepped inside, and then was almost sick with vertigo as the walls dropped away and she found herself at the edge of a bottomless abyss. Far, far away, a ledge on the other side taunted her with its promise of safety._

_"OK. Probably a 16-digit passcode. 16 platforms. I can do this" _

_She closed her eyes and concentrated._

Back in the darkened hotel room, lit only by the flicker of the screens, the redhead's breathing slowed, only the ceaseless glitter from her eyes sparkling faster than ever. Her anxiously waiting companion watched her carefully, biting her lip in a nervousness she rarely let any outsider see.

_Willow's eyes opened again: and there, floating in the void, was the barest shadow, a glimmer of light. Fighting terror, she stepped out onto it; and almost collapsed with relief when it bore her weight. One down. Now for the second… an eternity slipped by, and there it was. Off to the left, a long pace out over a million miles of nothingness. She took the step, carefully not looking down until she was safely stood there, then looked back…only to whimper in fear as the platform she'd just left faded from sight._

_No going back._

_There was a wind here in the abyss, a hungry wind that wanted to claim her, pull her down with it. Faint voices seemed to chitter on the edge of hearing, calling her down to them. "Just my imagination," she said to herself firmly. But unfortunately, the rest of her body found her imagination remarkably convincing. Summoning up every reserve of courage and determination she had, she forced herself to concentrate on visualising the third platform. And then the fourth, and then the fifth…_

_Here, she had no heart to pound in her chest. No breath to catch in her throat. No glands to flood her body with adrenaline, no sweat to bead cold on her brow and run down her back. Only an occasional flicker in her avatar marked the stress of that crossing, and after twenty lifetimes (5.39 seconds by the clock) she crossed to the safety of the other side._

_Relative__ safety. She knew that every step she took now would be recorded, logged. Random security programs would check her connection, try to locate and identify it. She'd done everything she could to delay that process: set up false leads, disguised her identity; but she knew it would only slow down the security programs. Eventually they'd find her – unless she was already long gone. So, with only a moment to catch her breath, she set off deeper into the construct._

_Here past the security barrier the environment took on more of the appearance of a corporate office building, although the iron-grey colour scheme remained. Corridors stretched away into the distance, signs over each turn-off indicating directions: Human Resources, Client Database, Special Projects, Demon Resources, Files and Records, Finance… seeing the last sign, she turned in that direction and picked up the pace, striding down the steel corridor confidently. She even recovered something of her sense of humour. "Look at me," she thought, "Challenging a perfect, immortal machine… only not so much with the panting and sweating, 'cause that would be gross." Moments later, she passed through another portal and found herself at her destination. Grinning in triumph, she sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, cupped her hands, then opened them to reveal a gleaming crystal orb which she set on the ground in front of her._

_In her visualisation, this place looked much like a bank vault, its walls lined with rows of safety deposit boxes stretching high overhead. Each was locked, of course: the individual security on each account was probably as strong or stronger than that on the system as a whole. She could have cracked into them, of course, given time… but time was very much a finite resource at the moment. Fortunately there was a better way, which was why her intrusion had been so carefully planned for this precise occasion. It was month-end, when clients settled their accounts, bills were paid and staff salaries disbursed; and when…_

_…there was a click and one of the vault doors swung open. Seconds later it closed again, but too late: she'd logged the combination. W&H.AR.5624554523c56gh3. She picked up her crystal and touched it to the door: nothing happened for a second, and if she had breath here she'd be holding it… but then the door clicked again and it was open. No time to waste: in her hands there was suddenly a sack, and she began to pull out crisp bundles of cash from the vault and shovel it into the bag. In reality, of course, she was transferring electronic funds through a complex series of cut-outs and relays to a blind account she and Kennedy had set up earlier that week, relying on a combination of her computer skills and Kennedy's financial acumen to keep it secure and secret; but the sack metaphor was more fun. In a fit of whimsy, she'd even inscribed the word 'swag' in big letters on the side of the bag. Before long the vault was empty, and she waited, for seconds only, until a second vault door opened further down the room._

_Once again the crystal absorbed the combination, and she hurried to open the vault. This one, though, had very little money in it… probably just petty cash or an individual project account. She checked the time nervously: there was probably still enough leeway for one more before she would have to leave, or – _

_There was absolutely no warning at all, and only some sixth sense allowed her to roll desperately to one side as the razor-sharp, metre-long blade scraped down her side and embedded itself deep in the floor instead of piercing her heart. Gasping with pain, the crystal clattering unheeded from her hand onto the floor, she turned – and looked into the eyes of nightmare._

_Glittering, cold, black and evil. Multiple limbs of coiled wire and steel. Claws like swords. It pulled itself free of the earth with contemptuous ease and fixed its poisonous gaze on her, poised to spring, to tear, to rend…_


	3. Chapter 3

_Any normal person would have been paralysed with fear; the creature's designers had deliberately played on all the worst terrors that lurk in the human subconscious to achieve that aim. To a Sunnydale veteran, it was just another demon, and not even a real one. Willow even took an instant to admire the artistry of the anti-intrusion program as she assessed her opponent and prepared her countermeasures._

_A gleaming sword of light appeared in her hand. In the real world she was a competent enough fighter when necessary, but of course no match for a Slayer, and she knew to play to her strengths. But here it was mental, not physical abilities which counted, and her smile was cold and focussed as she poised to strike._

_The demonic avatar forestalled her, leaping to the attack. But for all its steel-trap speed, Willow's reactions were an order of magnitude faster. The creature seemed to float gracefully through the air towards her, and stepping to the side she swung her sword up and around, cleaving through ceramic skin and metal bone, severing wire tendons. Normal time reasserted itself as the crippled security program crashed in an ugly mass on the ground where she'd been standing nanoseconds earlier._

_But it wasn't dead. Steel cables shot out like snakes, coiling around her legs in an evil parody of sensuality. Sweeping her off her feet, reeling her in to the dark waiting maw lined with crushing and grinding mandibles. Desperately she hacked at the cables with the sword, but for every one she cut two more took its place. So, grimly reversing her blade, she leaped straight towards the looming foe._

_Hot breath, smell of oil and ozone and dark glittering death millimetres from her face, but the sword pierced the enemy through and clove its heart. Cascading system errors tore the anti-intrusion program apart, and it unravelled into wisps of smoke that shredded into nothing as her body hurtled through and beyond them, crashing to the ground._

_"Ow." She picked herself up painfully, the sword disappearing back to wherever it had come from. This was her cue to leave. If one countermeasure had found her, others would soon be clustering around… and worse, they'd be tracing her physical location too. She looked around for her crystal, not wanting to leave it behind – and then she noticed. It was charged with another password. While she'd been distracted during the fight, someone must have accessed another of the accounts… and the coding on the crystal indicated it had been one of the unmarked doors over in the far corner of the room. She almost decided to leave it, but then shrugged. Might as well get some reward for her victory. No time to look at the contents of the account, though; just open it, empty it, and away. _

_But as she turned to the exit, a sinister metallic rustle echoed through the chamber._

_Three – no, six, no, a dozen of the monsters squeezed through the portal into the room, their claws clattering on the metal floor, the walls, the ceiling, their mandibles clacking with unholy glee, their glowing eyes fixed on Willow – who grinned, gave them a little wave… and vanished. _

Back in the hotel room, the redhead groaned in exhaustion and slumped forward, the laptop's power cord hanging loose in her hand. She murmured a quick prayer of apology to the spirit of her old computer science teacher, who would have been most disappointed (and surprised) to see her shutting down her machine that way; but she hadn't really had a choice. In the darkness she could just make out the paler oval of her companion's face, still watching over her anxiously, waiting for reassurance. Just give her a minute, she was so tired…

And then the hotel room's picture window _exploded_ inwards…

…deadly glass splinters turning the bedding, the furniture, the wallpaper to ragged strips…

…ice-cold wind, deafening noise, and a neat line of gaping holes right through the wall opposite the window…

But the brunette had been moving even before the first sign of danger, grabbing her up in hasty but careful hands, lifting her clean off her feet as if she weighed nothing, whirling both of them safely into the corner of the room.

Then dark shapes appeared against the starlit sky, rappeling down from above through the broken window, and the redhead made herself as small and quiet as she could as her companion rose to face them. This was _her_ skill, her power, and the redhead could only watch.

And wonder.

There were perhaps half a dozen of the intruders, black-clad shadowy forms the size and shape of humans, and they were armed, and they were dangerous. And they were helpless. The diminitive form of the dark-haired woman was in between them before they could react, moving with superhuman speed, striking with superhuman strength. An elbow to the throat here, a kick to a kneecap there. One of the intruders managed to bring around his gun, only to receive one of his companions thrown bodily into his face; the burst of fire went wild, stitching holes in the ceiling as both men went down. A chair broke over the head of the fifth, and the last received a calculated and deliberate knee to the crotch that laid him out retching and moaning on the ground.

The brunette stood triumphantly amidst the debris that had seconds earlier been an attack force, and grinned back at her lover.

Who could only watch in horror as the seventh member of the squad loomed up in the window and levelled his gun.

A scream of warning began in her throat, but the words couldn't form in time.

_The intruder checked his target, selected autofire and squeezed the trigger._

The brunette noticed the expression on her girlfriend's face and started to turn.

_The first bullet hit her low in the abdomen, piercing her spleen and starting to spin her around._

The redhead's throat clenched in sympathetic agony, but no words could come.

_The second bullet nicked the bottom of her left lung. Bright crimson blood blossomed out through the exit wound._

The world seemed to turn grey around her, only the twisting tormented figure at the centre of her vision still in focus.

_The third bullet hit the centre of her chest, but was deflected off a rib and missed her heart and spine by a whisker. _

A darkness woke and stirred deep within her soul. A hidden ugliness that lurked beneath her core.

_The fourth bullet passed through the top of her right lung. More blood sprayed out, and started to bubble from her mouth._

She couldn't move, but her brain was racing; recording every moment with painful clarity. Remembering a similar occasion.

_The fifth bullet scored a bloody furrow across her shoulder._

The darkness coiled and stretched, seeing its moment. It tasted of panic and rage and bleak hatred.

_The sixth, seventh and eighth bullets hit the far wall._

The band across her chest seemed to release suddenly, and air filled her lungs. Desperate raw refusal flooded through her, turning her skin to fire, her eyes to cold obsidian. Her scream was twisted despair and defiance and anger against the universe.

The gunman didn't even realise he was dead as his body exploded into red bloody mist. The crew of the stealth helicopter hovering overhead knew a brief instant of panic before its fuel tanks exploded in a bright fireball high over the city, like sunrise come early. Flaming debris showered down over the deserted street far below.

Her eyes swept to the groaning forms of the disabled earlier attackers, and their black fires burned colder yet…

And for a moment she stood there, frozen in time. Fighting a battle more terrible than any she'd yet faced, because the enemy she fought was as strong as herself. Stronger.

No.

Weaker. Because the enemy _was_ herself, or a part of her. _Only_ a part.

Tears glistened in soft hazel eyes as she ran over to the sprawled, bleeding body of her lover.


	4. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

_Some time later_

Willow eased the rented convertible off the potholed road onto the grass and sighed with relieved tension. A quick but careful check on the passenger laid out on the back seat showed she was breathing steadily and normally. Just asleep. Opening the door, the redhead stepped out onto the cool earth and stretched. The wind ruffled her hair playfully.

Behind her, the Pacific Ocean was still dark and brooding, untouched by the first rays of sunlight sliding through and over the mountains and sparkling off the dancing waves in the bay. The headland she was standing on was once a line of bluffs, separating the coastal plain from the sea. For a brief time it had been the rim of a crater. Then came a time of storms and high winds, and the greedy ocean had broken through; and now she stood on a promontory guarding the entrance to a perfect circular bay. There was talk of developing the area for watersports, a marina… but for the time being it was mostly deserted.

Which suited her fine. There were a lot of memories up here. She forced herself to visit, every time she passed through southern California. To remind herself what had happened, and possibly – she was willing to admit in the privacy of her own mind – as a form of penance. Self-punishment, even. But now the tumbled yellow stonework was half-hidden by flourishing weeds, and a few hardy wind-blown grasses had even started to colonise the scorched black circle of ground she'd thought permanently dead. Life continued, and the world moved on.

Her reflections were brought to a rapid halt by the faint sounds of stirring behind her. Whirling round, she met Kennedy's eyes as she slowly blinked awake, and smiled tenderly.

"How d'you feel, sweetie?"

"Urgh. Like I've just been shot half a dozen ti- No, wait a minute. Actually I feel great… which is kinda weird when you think about it."

"Well, you are a Slayer. You've got all those mystical healing powers of yours."

"Yeah. Although I suspect Willow healing powers might have been involved somewhere along the line too, huh?"

Willow grinned in reply. "I'm just glad you're safe. Things got pretty bad back there. Um, d'you think we ought to pay compensation to the hotel for, y'know, wrecking their entire top floor?"

Kennedy looked dubious. "How much compensation are we talking about? I mean, I could ask Dad for an advance on my allowance…my allowance for the next _forty years_… but even that's hardly going to…" She trailed off as Willow tried, and failed rather badly, to suppress a fit of giggles. "Hold on. What is it you're not telling me?"

Willow's grin became even broader, but instead of replying she reached over to the car's front passenger seat for the PDA lying there. Switching it on and activating the cell modem, she tossed it to Kennedy, who absently caught it one-handed, propped herself up on her other elbow and looked at the screen.

"So we did it? You managed to get into their accounts and get the - HOLY FREAKING CHRIST!!"

Willow's grin was becoming distinctly manic.

"Three million dollars? You stole _three million dollars_?"

"Um. No, Ken, you've, er, misread it. The decimal point is…"

Kennedy looked at the screen more carefully.

All the colour drained out of her face.

She tried desperately to speak, but nothing, not even a croak, could come out. It was, Willow thought slightly hysterically, the first time she'd ever seen her lover speechless. Possibly it was the first time in her life she'd ever _been_ speechless.

"…billion…?"

If Willow's grin got any broader, she worried she was about to do a First Evil impersonation and swallow herself.

"… three billion…?"

"I think Buffy's plan to set up a network of Slayer Academies just got its funding sorted, don't you think?"

"…three billion dollars…?"

"Three billion, one hundred and twelve million, six hundred and fifty-two thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six. And thirteen cents."

"…THREE BILLION DOLLARS…?!"

"Well, they're not just a multinational, they're a multi_dimensional_, probably with thousands of years of investments. And it turns out that last account I accessed linked to their central Head Office cash reserve…"

Kennedy's brain was slowly starting to work again. "You know we'll have to launder this, right? Split it up, spend a little bit here, invest a little bit there? It could, like, destabilise the whole world economy if we…"

Willow shrugged. "That's your department, sweetie. I steal it, you spend it. We're like Bonnie and, er, Bonnie."

"Yeah. But they're not gonna let us walk away from this. You know they'll be coming after us."

"So? Apocalyptic forces of evil are _always_ coming after us. It's what they do. No big."

"Maybe… so how about us? What are we gonna do now?"

"Well, I thought we should drive out towards –"

"C'mon, Red. I meant now now. Didn't you say something about partying after we did the job?"

"Huh? Well, I suppose we should celebrate, but isn't it a bit early in the day for drinking and AWK!"

Willow's startled squawk of protest melded smoothly into a husky giggle as Kennedy reached over and grasped her under the shoulders. With a Slayer's strength and grace she lifted her bodily over the car door and swung her down onto the back seat beside her.

"I didn't mean _that_ sort of party…"

THE END

Grr. Argh.


End file.
